Hi,
Giving titles to images is something that is done extremely frequently
in pretty much all applications of XHTML. (Of course, this wouldn’t
apply to images alone but also to code blocks, mathematical formulas and
inline svg.)
There are currently the following two mechanisms:
<img src="binarytree.png" title="Representation of a binary tree">…</img>
and in XHTML 2.0 also:
<img src="binarytree.png" id="binarytree">…</img>
<meta about="#binarytree" property="title">Representation of a binary
tree</meta>
Currently, the first is hardly used on the web because it requires
generated content to be made visible (unless you are satisfied with a
tooltip), and also doesn’t allow element content. On most web sites, you
will probably see that authors simply wrap the image in a <div>, and
create a separate <div class="title"> with the title below the image.
The second is better, but it still needs a property="title" attribute,
and it isn’t immediately clear from the name ‘meta’ that it can be used
for titles on images as well, so I wonder whether this will be
discoverable enough to authors.
So, isn’t a title something common enough to warrant an element of its
own? This could simply be a shortcut for <meta property="title">, or
provide more capabilities such as a container element to link the title
to its image by means of XML structure.
In any case, given that this is such a frequent use case, I propose to
add these two as examples to the specification, for clarification to
authors. Either at the ‘title’ attribute or the ‘img’ element.
~Grauw
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Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
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Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.